Fourth Sunday of Lent. Fr Aelred Connelly shares with us the lessons he learned from his parents.

I am writing this sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is Mother's day, having recently lost both my mother and godmother on the same morning. Things will never be quite the same again.

There is something poignant in the words of the parents of the blind man in today's Gospel: 'he is old enough; let him speak for himself'. Our parents never entirely let go their children until they finally go from this earth. My father died quite suddenly two years ago this past January. The older my parents got, the more I realised how much we, their children, had received from them. As one of my brethren wrote to me at the time of my father's death, 'He was a man of deep goodness.' I now begin to appreciate that this was equally true of my mother.